BOSTON — This being Fenway Park, the comparisons tend to be straight out of Cooperstown. Didn't Jim Rice once crush a home run that landed a block and a half up Landsdowne Street? Isn't there a grainy black-and-white somewhere of Mickey Mantle missing the light tower and leaving the building, his blast still rising?
This being 2021, Miguel Sano's addition to Fenway folklore comes with facts and figures and radar analysis. Sano's third-inning home run off Red Sox righthander Nick Pivetta, Statcast's algorithms determined Wednesday, left his bat at 116.7 mph, traveled 495 feet into the next zip code, and caused a gazillion looks of disbelief as it sailed over the farthest reach of the storied Green Monster and into the night beyond.
But it's almost as if the ghosts of Ted Williams and Babe Ruth intervened to prevent Sano's longest-in-the-majors-this-year blast to be properly remembered. Because two mere-mortal home runs Wednesday were far more dramatic: Kyle Schwarber's missile into the center-field seats off Alex Colome to tie the game in the ninth, and Josh Donaldson's game-winning rocket off Colome's former Twins understudy Hansel Robles into the Red Sox bullpen in the 10th.
Jake Cave continued the pummeling of Robles with a three-run home run in the Twins' five-run 10th, and Minnesota finished off a harder-than-it-should-have-been 9-6 victory, snapping its four-game losing streak.
Colome, the culprit in so many excruciating April losses, needed just six pitches to cough up the Twins' hard-earned two-run lead in the ninth inning. Kiké Hernandez led off with a double to straightaway center field, and Kyle Schwarber clobbered Colome's next pitch, tying the score and sending the crowd of 28,923 into a frenzy. It was the second consecutive blown save and sixth on the season for the Twins' righthander.
Two more Red Sox reached base, but Colome suddenly righted himself, retiring J.D. Martinez, Alex Verdugo and Hunter Renfroe in order to send the game into extra innings, where the Twins have now won 11 of their last 13 games.
Donaldson and Cave silenced the rowdy crowd with their home runs during the Twins' biggest extra-inning outburst since 2018. Good thing they added on, too, since Ralph Garza surrendered two runs, including a solo home run to Hernandez, in the bottom of the 10th.
The crushing-then-uplifting ending was a weird twist to the Twins' stressful week on the east coast, where they had lost the first four games to the Yankees and Red Sox by a combined 35-17 margin. But it was a severe right turn in a game that had seemed destined to be memorable in an entirely different way, until Colome's latest breakdown.
Bailey Ober shut down Boston's pesky offense for five innings, Caleb Thielbar and Kyle Barraclough recorded critical rally-snuffing outs, and the Twins eked out that two-run ninth-inning margin by allowing fewer than seven runs for the first time in eight days.
But as suspenseful as the pitching was, as essential as Jorge Polanco's third straight game with a home run, as entertaining as the defense that turned Boston's two farthest-hit balls into outs, it was Sano putting a baseball into orbit that seemed likely to be the dominant image of this game.
The burly first baseman has homered in three of his last four games, but none of them could match this one for sheer gargantuan awe. In fact, according to MLB's Statcast measurements, the rocket was the longest home run in MLB this season, and the second-longest ever hit by a Twin since the radar-based measurement system went on-line 14 years ago.
The longest? A blast that Sano hit in Target Field against Chicago's Ross Detwiler in 2019, a home run that traveled, by Statcast's reckoning, one foot farther.
